The classic
and definitive monster/horror film of all time, director James Whale's Frankenstein (1931)
is the screen version of Mary Shelley's Gothic 1818 nightmarish novel of the
same name (Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus). The film, with
Victorian undertones, was produced by Carl Laemmle Jr. for Universal Pictures,
the same year that Dracula (1931), another classic
horror film, was produced within the same studio - both films helped to save
the beleaguered studio. [The sequel to this Monster story is found in director
James Whale's even greater film, Bride of Frankenstein
(1935).]

The film's name was derived from the mad, obsessed scientist, Dr. Henry
Frankenstein (Colin Clive), who experimentally creates an artificial life
- an Unnamed Monster (Boris Karloff), that ultimately terrorizes the Bavarian
countryside after being mistreated by his maker's assistant Fritz and society
as a whole. The film's most famous scene is the one in which Frankenstein
befriends a young girl named Maria at a lake's edge, and mistakenly throws
her into the water (and drowns her) along with other flowers.

In addition to this film, dozens of other adaptations have been made of
the Frankenstein horror story (and lots of other variations such as Abbott
and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Frankenstein Meets the Space
Monster (1965), Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein
(1974) (shot in the same castle and with the same props and lab
equipment as the original film), and Frankenhooker (1990)), including:

Van Helsing (2004), d. Stephen
Sommers, opens with
a slightly modified (revisionist) creation scene and the ending burning
windmill scene from the original film (in black and white!) as a springboard
for the film

Originally, the famed Dracula actor Bela Lugosi was
cast as the Monster, and French director Robert Florey was assigned to
direct. But after various screen tests, Lugosi refused the part, and Universal
chose Britisher James Whale to direct. Significantly, this film then launched
the career of unknown actor Boris Karloff, who is surprisingly uncredited
in the opening credits of the film as the Monster. In the beginning credits
titled
"The Players," the Monster is listed fourth, with a question mark after its
name. In the end credits, however, where the cast list is prefaced by - "a
good cast is worth repeating...," the Monster is listed fourth with BORIS
KARLOFF's name following. Karloff's performance is remarkable - his acting
communicated a hint of the pitiful humanity of the grotesque Monster behind
its hideous, stitched and bolted-together body.

The Story

In the opening, pre-credits prologue, the film is introduced
by a tuxedoed gentleman (Edward van Sloan, one of the principal characters
in the film) who steps from behind a closed curtain and delivers the following
teaser - a "friendly warning" - to the audience:

How do you do? Mr. Carl Laemmle [the producer] feels it would be
a little unkind to present this picture without just a word of friendly warning.
We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein, a man of science who sought
to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God. It is one
of the strangest tales ever told. It deals with the two great mysteries of
creation - life and death. I think it will thrill you. It may shock
you. It might even - horrify you. So if any of you feel that you do
not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now's your chance to - uh,
well, we warned you.

The credits play with an eerie set of rotating eyes as a backdrop. The
film then opens with a close-up of a pair of hands hauling up a rope. As
dusk approaches, the camera pans across a group of weeping and wailing mourners
and priests during a funeral service around a gravesite, in front of a statue
of a skeletal Grim Reaper. The memorable, expressionistic grave-robbing
scene occurs near the Bavarian mountain village of Goldstadt. [The village
was constructed for the previous year's film All
Quiet on the Western Front (1930).] Beneath the gloomy sky, a coffin
is being lowered into a grave. Crouched in the background from behind the
cemetery fence, brilliant medical scientist (but slightly insane and overwrought)
Dr. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his dwarfish, bumbling, hunchbacked
assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) eagerly watch the proceedings. The first few
clodfuls of dirt that hit the top of the casket make a dull clump/thud [an
impressive effect for early talkie audiences].

They
are there to steal the newly-buried fresh male corpse for an experiment
that Frankenstein is conducting on the secrets of life. After the cemetery
is vacated and the grave is filled in by a grave digger, they creep in
and strip off their jackets, carelessly tossing them into the dirt behind
them. The two dig up the fresh grave after the grave-digger has left. To
symbolize Henry's sacrilegious lack of respect for the subject of death
- an example of black humor, one shovelful of his dirt is irreverently
thrown directly into the face of a nearby statue of the Grim Reaper! After
completing the digging, they stand the coffin on end. Frankenstein pats
the coffin with his ear close to it, murmuring that there will be a resurrection: "He's
just resting - waiting for a new life to come." They haul the heavy
coffin back with them on a cart as the moon rises. The film is enhanced by
dark and forbidding Transylvanian settings.

On the way up a jagged, rocky slope, Fritz reluctantly climbs
up a post and cuts down an executed criminal hanging from a gallows' rope.
Struggling, he crawls along the crossbar with a knife between his teeth.
Frankenstein hopes to use the victim's brain in his experimental attempt
to assemble a new human life form, but the body falls to the ground. "The neck's broken;
the brain is useless. We must find another brain," laments Frankenstein
- not surprising since the man was the victim of a hanging.

Needing only a brain, Dr. Frankenstein sends his dwarfish
assistant to his old, nearby medical school (Goldstadt Medical College)
to steal one. [Frankenstein left the school when his demands for experiments
with humans were not approved.] Fritz peers through the windows of the
College, where medical students in an operating amphitheatre watch a dissection
demonstration on a corpse of a psychopath "whose life was one of brutality, of violence,
and murder." College
Professor Waldman (Edward van Sloan), in front of floodlights, teaches about
the differences between a normal brain ("one of the most perfect specimens
of the human brain") and the degenerate murderer's brain ("the abnormal
brain of the typical criminal"). The Professor delineates the degenerative
characteristics of the criminal brain - "the scarcity of convolutions
on the frontal lobe...and the distinct degeneration of the middle frontal
lobe."

After the class concludes and the students are dismissed,
a window at the back of the amphitheatre opens - Fritz stumbles in and
down to the front where he finds the two jars of brains on display in the
room. One of the brains is normal, labeled "Cerebrum - Normal Brain." He grabs its glass
jar and begins to rush out of the dissecting room, but inadvertently drops
it when startled by the loud sound of a gong. In order not to disappoint
Dr. Frankenstein, however, the dim-witted Fritz desperately grabs the other
glass jar labeled
"Dysfunctio Cerebri - Abnormal Brain."

The next scene opens with a close-up of a framed picture
of Henry Frankenstein with a flickering candle burning closeby. A maid
announces a family friend visitor: "Herr Victor Moritz," followed
by a close-up of Victor Moritz' (John Boles) face. Frankenstein's fiancee
Elizabeth (Mae Clarke) greets him in the wood-paneled, high-vaulted, Victorian
style parlor of the Frankenstein manor. She is concerned, worried, and
uncertain about Henry, and wondering if he is emotionally disturbed. Anxious
about her marital partner, she explains how Henry's most recent letter,
the first she has had in four months, makes no sense. He has shut himself
off from the outside world, working to the limits of his endurance with
his experiments in an isolated, abandoned watchtower that serves as a laboratory.
The mysterious letter reads:

You must have faith in me, Elizabeth. Wait, my work must come first,
even before you. At night the winds howl in the mountains. There is no one
here. Prying eyes can't peer into my secret...I am living in an abandoned
old watchtower close to the town of Goldstadt. Only my assistant is here to
help me with my experiments.

She explains that Henry told her about his strange experiments at a significant
time - just before they became engaged and he retreated to his mountain
laboratory away from her:

The very day we announced our engagement, he told me of his experiments.
He said he was on the verge of a discovery so terrific that he doubted his
own sanity. There was a strange look in his eyes, some mystery. His words
carried me right away. Of course I've never doubted him but still I worry.
I can't help it.

Victor saw Henry three weeks earlier, when he was walking
alone in the woods, and was told that no one was allowed to visit him in
his laboratory: "His
manner was very strange." He suggests going to see Dr. Waldman, Henry's
former professor and paternalistic mentor in medical school. Victor also
reveals that he is a rival lover with affectionate interest in Henry's
future bride:

Victor: Perhaps he can tell me more about all this.
Elizabeth: Oh Victor, you're a dear.
Victor: You know I'd go to the ends of the earth for you.
Elizabeth: I shouldn't like that. I'm far too fond of you.
Victor: I wish you were!
Elizabeth: (she turns away) Victor.
Victor: I'm sorry.

With Elizabeth's insistence to join him, they leave the
comfortable, secure surroundings of the living room area, and go together
to discuss their concerns with Dr. Waldman. The scene at Waldman's office
at the College, already in progress, shows a row of skulls positioned on
one of the shelves of his bookcases. On his desk is a row of test tubes
and another grinning skull. Surrounded by symbols of death, Waldman is
also troubled by their news: "Herr
Frankenstein is a most brilliant young man, yet so erratic he troubles me." Frankenstein's
research in "chemical galvanism and electro-biology were far in advance
of our theories here at the University" and had reached dangerously advanced
stages. His experiments to recreate human life, and his demands for corpses
"were becoming dangerous":

Waldman: Herr Frankenstein is greatly changed.
Victor: You mean changed as a result of his work?
Waldman: Yes, his work, his insane ambition to create life.
Elizabeth: How? How? Please tell us everything, whatever it is.
Waldman: The bodies we use in our dissecting room for lecture purposes were
not perfect enough for his experiments, he said. He wished us to supply him
with other bodies and we were not to be too particular as to where and how
we got them. I told him that his demands were unreasonable. And so he left
the University to work unhampered. He found what he needed elsewhere.
Victor: Oh! The bodies of animals. Well, what are the lives of a few rabbits
and dogs?
Waldman: (leaning forward ominously) You do not quite get what I mean. Herr
Frankenstein was interested only in human life - first to destroy it, then
recreate it. There you have his mad dream.

Waldman is not up-to-date on Henry's morbid research and crazy experiments
and how he was grave-digging for already-dead corpses. Elizabeth begs that
Dr. Waldman join them to visit Henry's lab in the watchtower where the mad
experiments are taking place, and he reluctantly agrees.